Comment by ajross
1 day ago
"Failure" is the expected median though. You can't due-diligence your way out of "startup ran out of runway"!
The discussion here isn't about funding, it's that there's a presumptively useful community tool which got abandoned because its owners took their toys and went home when the money ran out (instead of making a sincere effort at transitioning to community governance). That's on the IP owners being selfish jerks and/or grifting losers. It's not the VC's fault.
It's not on anyone to set up your favourite "governance" system. If anyone honestly wants to keep maintaining or using it the code is still there.
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No, there is no social contract here. Microsoft gives free hosting because it's cheap and also provides a path to their paid offerings. People share stuff they work on for fun, to help flesh out their resume, to get help, etc. There's no reason for a maintainer not to drop a project in a heartbeat if it becomes the slightest bit of a burden.
There are no maintainership obligations unless someone pays you for them.
No it's not.
Also read the link. This is apache 2 licensed. Even in whatever imaginary world where there is such a social contract, there is thankfully a legal contract that includes disclaimer of warranty.
Sorry but this is an outrageous perspective, at no point does git init / git push am I committing myself to a social contract, in fact there’s probably a license that states no warranty and no support is to be expected… maintainership obligations gtfo if you’re not here paying for support
While most startups fail eventually, failure in less than a year with over 7 million dollars is not the expected median. It’s the exact sort of thing that due diligence is supposed to prevent.
Also the whole project is open source. If you want, you could take it over.
That's why either VCs confused moat with bot farms and farmed stars over solving genuine problems or they just blindly invested based on founders track record no matter what. To me both are really by product vibe coding hype and chatgpt killing wrappers.
Are there cases when VC investors actually went after founders for fraud or embezzlement or misrepresenting the business or something like that?
At least the repo is still available. Anyone can fork and carry on, create a community, etc.
If the creators could not do anything with it after raising funds, then why is it expected that somebody will fix it for free?
Forking only makes sense if the creators are also monetising it successfully.
If people are complaining then it means that they must've found it to be of value. If they found it to be valuable enough that they really want work done on it again, they can always do that work themselves (or hire someone to). There is 0 connection between forking and successful monetization.
Which toys exactly were taken? The repo seems open source, is any component missing?
In response to sibling: > It's still open source because you can fork it if you really want
Yes, that's exactly what it means!
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The project is Apache2 licensed. You can literally do anything you want with the code. Stop trying to push guilt on people for no longer providing free services.
I suppose you can ask them for a refund.
the only reason to ever fork a project in earnest is because the original project owners are not willing or able to cooperate or accept patches. in other words you fork because you have nowhere else to go. exactly the situation we have here.